A PROXY STATE

Catherine A. Fitzpatrick
Executive Director of the International League for Human Rights

Published in RFE/RL Newsline, March 18, 1999

Belarus is the post-Soviet story everybody was hoping wouldn't happen. Much of the reason for that unfortunate development is that it has become a country of proxies. For the United States, Belarus is a proxy for frustrations at the slow pace of post cold-war reform, a country Washington can criticize for abuses it is reluctant to criticize forcefully in other post-communist countries.

For its neighbors, Poland and Lithuania, their tacit support for the Belarusian opposition serves as a proxy for a tough policy and as a cost-free demonstration for their commitment to Western values. And for Russia, Belarus serves as a proxy for Soviet-style behavior Moscow has not renounced and for expressions of aspirations for Slavic unity.

But most Belarusians do not have the luxury of living by proxy. Their lives are all too real, including waiting in line for what some call "proxy eggs." These eggs have disappeared from the shelves because they were shipped to feed the Russian military in payment for Belarus' Gazprom debt -- or so the grumblers in the long lines complain.

If the Belarusian people can't live by proxy, the Belarusian opposition sometimes has been forced to precisely because of the way many outsiders have played this game. Unable to gain mass support because of their lack of access to media and persistent Soviet-style attitudes of accepting whoever is in power, the opposition there has seen its ranks repeatedly reduced by the hundreds as a result of 10-day jail sentences for participation in peaceful demonstrations. Activists have been forced into temporary or permanent exile or internal emigration for fear of retaliation against relatives.

Despite all this, there are some encouraging signs: young people are joining the opposition in greater numbers, the small but feisty independent press continues to operate, Charter 97, a protest group styled on the one in Czechoslovakia, has garnered 100,000 signatures, and workers have gone into the streets by the thousands.

But because support for these activities has waned as outsiders engage in their proxy campaigns, these new infusions may not arrive soon enough to prevent more disasters.

And as a result, some leaders of the Belarusian opposition hope to be able to wage their terribly real struggle by proxy as well, all the while retaining their belief that "the West" will step in and stand up to the bullies, carve out a space where the opposition can breathe, and sustain it morally and financially. So far, however, the opposition has been disappointed, and its disappointments have turned into anger, as demonstrated in the case of Victor Gonchar. He heads the opposition Central Electoral Commission, appointed by a democratic parliament, which questioned Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenka's fraudulent referendum in 1996, and was therefore closed down by leather-jacketed thugs. Since then, Gonchar and his colleagues in the 13th Supreme Soviet -- the democratically-elected parliament also suppressed by Lukashenka -- have been struggling valiantly but in vain to restore the basic institutions of democracy.

This problem has been compounded by Germany's new role. Ambassador Hans-Georg Wieck of Germany, head of the OSCE mission in Minsk, has called for a compromise in Belarus. The Germans have now rotated into the chair of the European Union, and lead the European chorus, always mindful of Russia's wrath, to keep the Belarus problem as a "dialogue" inside OSCE. Such a quid pro quo would allow Lukashenka to stay in office until 2001 without facing the elections mandated under the 1994 constitution he abrogated. And objections by several other German political figures -- such as Erika Schroedter, a Green member of the German parliament who serves as a delegate to the OSCE -- give some hope that Bonn may change its position eventually.

Jacobo Timmerman, the Argentine writer and himself a former political prisoner, once said, "Quiet diplomacy is quiet. Silent diplomacy is surrender." When European institutions called upon to defend human rights vigorously refuse to stand up to bullies, they will ultimately suffer as well. The proxy war in Belarus is raging largely out of sight of the world, and rather than understanding it as a fight about human rights and democracy, key Western figures have reduced it to a political quarrel about a constitution that needs "compromise, dialogue, and mediation." By relativizing the underlying human rights disaster that preceded the current impasse, OSCE and the European Parliament have betrayed the Helsinki principles. "There cannot be a dialogue from prison," noted Boris Gyunter, one of the Belarusian opposition leaders who was recently sent to jail.

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